McCreadies Gold

Set in Glasgow; Tynemouth and Australia - it tells of a merchant seaman who is estranged from his wife and two sons after their divorce in 1908. His wife Edna moves to Glasgow where she brings up her two children in the Gorbals a notorious slum. Her son Allan is killed during the war but Robert fails a medical and works as a shipyard welder. he meets Patricia and they get married. They have two sons Robert Jr and James. they go to live in the newly built Red Road Tower Block.
Robert receives a phone call telling him that his father has died and that he must go to London where the will is to be read. He is left a key to a safe deposit box and the deeds to a house in Tynemouth. what he reads in the letter will take him and his two sons halfway across the world on an adventure.
McCreadies Gold is definitely one to read.

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his water canister the water came out very slowly and it took two hours to fill up two canisters.

By the end of the sixth day Rob father was really ill, the wound had gone septic, and without anti biotic drugs he would surely die. The girls had lost that much weight that the shorts they were wearing kept falling off their hips, their lips we cracked and bleeding.

Rob had asked them to drink their own urine as he was but they refused.

Both Robert and James had lost over three stones in weight. James was showing signs of delirium and it was only Rob who was really functioning.

He did catch two lizards by putting a few grains of rice under a rock with a piece light wood to hold it up. The idea was that the lizard had to walk past the piece of wood to eat the rice in doing so moved the stick and the stone came down on top of it crushing it. It was eaten with some bush onions that Rob managed to dig up.

On the seventh day Robert went into a coma he was very weak and Robert decided to go off alone to try and get help. He showed James how to collect water using the plastic sheet to collect dew from the trees.

The girls were badly sunburned and had blisters on there arms and on shoulders.

Rob left that evening with only a few mouthfuls of water that he had collected.

He wondered off and told the rest not to move and that he would come back for them

with water and food. He took his rifle with him Robert also had the water drum with him in case he stumbled upon fresh water. It was only Rob’s dogged determination that kept him going. After sixteen miles he found the motor way and he carried on until he came to a shack owned by two aborigines. Who gave him water he explained that there was more out in the bush and that they would be well paid if they could help them. He got into a beat up old truck with the water. The men sped off in the truck with him in the back. They found the men and women under the tree where he had left them. They were barely alive Rob and the natives gave them water then gently they lifted each of them back of the truck and took them back to the shack where they applied some special paste to the burns on the girl’s arms and shoulders.

They rang the local police who then sent a helicopter to pick them all up.

It was six weeks later when a police car pulled up a Bernard Crutchley’s house in Brisbane where he was arrested along with Gary Jacobs and Rob Johansen.

Both Johansen and Jacobs sang like canaries and told the police everything.

In a court case lasting two weeks all three men were sentenced to five years in prison.

Robert McCreadie wasn’t in court to give evidence but Rob his brother and the two women all gave evidence against the three men. Robert received the gold back that Crutchley had stolen from them.

The total value of the gold was worth over one million dollars.”

The mine produced three million ounces of gold which was split five ways. The two tribesmen who rescued them were able to buy a new house and a car each. They still live in the outback.